Peter Hagelstein on Problems Surrounding Cold Fusion (Video)

An interesting video has been posted recently on the Serious Science website which features Dr. Peter Hagelstein, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT talking about cold fusion, and why it is such a problem within the scientific community. Dr. Hagelstein is in a very small minority among American academics — he has long been a researcher and teacher about cold fusion, and takes it very seriously.

He talks about how the experimental results obtained in Fleischmann and Pons’ research reports went against the accepted understanding of physics, and also was not easily replicated, and therefore experimentalists who have reported positive cold fusion results were dismissed as being incompetent — and still are.

The major problem that cold fusion runs into from the point of view of most nuclear scientists, according to Hagelstein, is that if you have a nuclear reaction, what happens to the energetic particles that are supposed to be present in such reactions? If they are not present, accepted theory dictates that no nuclear reaction has taken place — and therefore cold fusion is dismissed.